Word: bertos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Love, which dealt with a nasty marriage conflict without becoming nasty, and The Conformist, the case history of a weakling whose weakness made him a Fascist. Carlo Levi (Christ Stopped at Eboli) came a cropper with The Watch, a sympathetic but unfocused look at his postwar land, but Giuseppe Berto followed an uneven first novel (The Sky Is Red) with The Brigand, the story of an Italian Robin Hood which exposed the despair of ordinary people with a fine mixture of candor and sympathy...
Hood for the poor peasants of his village but succeeds only in bringing misery to them and death to himself. A striking improvement over Berto's first novel, The Sky Is Red (TIME, Oct. 25, 1948), The Brigand shines with the kind of love for the Italian peasant that characterizes Ignazio Silone's novels._It is a tone of love which almost never finds its way into U.S. writing...
...Author Berto could easily have spoiled his book by sentimentalizing Michele into a hero of the oppressed, or by treating him merely as a vicious criminal. Instead, he has looked at him steadily with profound sympathy but also with implicit disapproval. The Brigand, as a social document, may help explain why many Italians have snapped at the Communist bait. As a novel, it is an honest and affecting picture of human beings in travail...
...discussed the works of the men whom he considered outstanding in the movement: Pratolini Flaiano, Vittorini, Levi, Berto, Malaparte, Moravia, Pavese, and Marrota. He considers Vittorini, whose 1937 novel "In Sicily" was recently published in this country by New Directions, to be the most important of the group...
...novelist, Giuseppe Berto has a lot to learn. He knows very little about how to pace a novel, how to build up climaxes and tighten tensions; he often touches the incongruous by putting much too mature speeches into the mouths of his babes. But most U.S. readers will find in The Sky Is Red, as in such recent Italian films as Open City and Shoe-Shine, a raw and brutal vitality that slicker performances often lack...